Before we start, I presume the reader (you that is) has some knowledge of Polygonal modeling. But even if you don't, this tutorial will still be useful for anyone that is starting off, or at an intermediate level. I have tried to explain everything in detail as much as I could.

Starting off

My inspiration obviously came from the film 'I, Robot', which originated from the book by Isaak Asimov. I claim to be one of his biggest fans to my friends and anyone I meet, to the point of obsession, so in turn it was inevitable that I had to do one of the robots from his works. Starting off, I gathered many pieces of reference images, maybe up to 20 pictures in total. Yet I had no good ones to store into the max scene to use as reference. But it didn't matter. This is why this project was so interesting. It is always important to study the thing which you wish to model in 3D so that you can do it even if (as me) you have to use different methods.

Stage One

This stage was pretty simple. It involved in making a humanoid head with simple features and a easy following geometrically sound shape. Wow, long sentence :). For this part I did a quick model of a human head using reference pictures from the internet, google is always the best thing to use for this. There are many found on http://www.onnovanbraam.com. After the head was finished I then had to look at the close up pictures of the NS5 robot and adjust the head to match the look of the robot in the film. This took little time and effort.

Click to Enlarge

Stage Two

A quick way to model the NS5 chest was to create a sphere with a low poly count. My count for the sphere had about 16 segments, which is half from the standard 32. This was easy to configure later on. Then extending the front view I converted the sphere into a poly model and deleted half of the sphere including the top part and the bottom part as to make a space for the neck and the torso area at the bottom. Then looking at the reference pictures of the NS5 I adjusted the shape of the torso by moving the vertices to match the shape. This pretty much felt like a art session, where you have to look at the subject, pencil to paper, look at the subject, pencil to paper.....to get it right. To make the inside of the robots chest, I copied this part, then made small segments out of it. Simply done by deleting polygons until I had different parts.